Nick Grossman
General Manager, Union Square Ventures

Nick is a General Manager at Union Square Ventures, where he invests in new web and mobile platforms, works with USV portfolio companies, and leads USV’s efforts on public policy and regulatory issues that impact open innovation the health of the web.

Previously, he led an incubator for technology and media businesses at OpenPlans, which, among other things, pioneered the open311 web standard, founded the largest open source project in the public transit space, and built NYC’s real-time bus data platform.

Nick has present and past academic affiliations at the Berkman Center for Internet Society at Harvard Law School and at the MIT Media Lab, and is on the advisory boards of the Data & Society Institute, the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Tumml urban ventures accelerator, Living Cities, and Code for America. He has a degree in Urban Studies from Stanford University and learned everything he knows about technology from people on the internet and by using view:source. He grew up in Brooklyn and now lives outside of Boston with his wife and two kids.

So much of the culture of the web stands in stark contrast to our notions of what it’s like to work with the government, but a lot is quietly changing, and there’s increasingly an opportunity for web 2.0 teams to make a real impact on the $166B government technology market. There's money to be made, but glory as well, as this largest of our public institutions is in desperate need of disruption.
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